Monthly Archives: August 2007

I just updated the perfor­mance section of the site, which hasn’t seen new content in… awhile. Specif­i­cally, I put up a bunch of audio clips from my May concert at Steinway Hall, selected mainly on the basis of number of Glaring Errors. So, you get to hear me play Beethoven, I get to hide my mistakes behind the curtain, and everybody’s happy. No, but really, I will send you the full audio if you want. It’s just too big to post on my server, which seems to be getting slower by the day. If anybody knows a good and cheap hosting company, then please challah at me.

I mentioned before that I’ve been writing a couple of new things this summer, and here is what they are: a solo piano piece and a nonet for The Hindemith Ensemble. The piano piece is for Richard Dyer, who has been about to retire for, as far as I can tell, the last two or three years. I was initially intim­i­dated by the prospect of writing music for a music critic. (Does anybody know any histor­i­cal examples of this?) The idea I ended up going with was pretty much the first thing that came to me, namely that a critic spends most of his time doing what most people do only on special occa­sions. It’s a pretty enviable position, on one hand, but actually I think it must take a whole lot of dedi­ca­tion to drag yourself to the orches­tra night after night, or even to eat at restau­rants all the time if you are a food critic. So what I thought I could provide is the “sorbet” between courses, some­thing of a light palette-cleanser that also would be a good prepa­ra­tion for listen­ing to other, heavier music. This piece will be premièred in Boston sometime this fall.

The nonet is a pretty single-minded piece which takes a long melody line and just jams, man. Seri­ously, after a year of writing exclu­sively piano music, I was hanker­ing for some sustainin’ action. So it ends up being clarinet-driven. It has a kind of autumnal feeling, which I know is mean­ing­less, but for me is a desir­able quality. New Haven is at its best in the fall. If you come over to my house, I will cook root vegeta­bles.

We had a dumpling-making party last night and listened to The Most Unwanted Music, which you can listen to here (MP3). It’s the result of a purport­edly “scien­tific” study on people’s musical likes and dislikes by the duo Komar & Melamid (its compan­ion piece, The Most Wanted Song, is terrif­i­cally banal). The results are predictable: people like cheesy five-minute rock/R&B love songs much more than they like accor­dions and chil­drens’ choirs. (What’s funny is that people equally wanted and didn’t want “synthe­sizer” and “intel­lec­tual stim­u­la­tion,” I suppose because both these things can take so many differ­ent guises.)

Anyway, The Most Unwanted Song is great party music. It covers a bewil­der­ing styl­is­tic range, from rap-opera to adver­tiz­ing jingle to faux-German Sprech­stimme. The subject matter includes, as far as I can tell, How Awesome Being a Cowboy is, How Awesome Shopping at Walmart is, and Wittgen­stein. The huge orches­tra, which often indulges in Day in the Life-esque atonal freak-outs, includes a pipe organ, bagpipes, banjo, harp, and the most persis­tent wood­blocks you’ve ever heard. For all its weird­ness, it’s quite a happy, rousing piece of music, mostly because you’re rolling around on the floor after about three minutes (the whole thing is 25 minutes long, which really takes stamina).